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News needs more-creative scandal names

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Thursday January 23, 2014 5:00 AM

I am appalled by the lack of creativity of American journalists and headline writers. More than
40 years after the fact, they cannot resist attaching the suffix “gate” to any scandal that
arises.

The latest example is the fiasco involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the George
Washington Bridge. Rather than coming up with a new term, the journalists and headline writers
again cannot resist calling it “Bridgegate.”

There was a reason for using the term “Watergate” to describe the activities of the 1970s in and
around the Washington, D.C., area: It was the name of the office complex that was broken into.